Kirk Cousins Did His Best Daniel Day-Lewis Impression Before Jets Game

WASHINGTON — It was only as backup quarterback Colt McCoy was walking out of the tunnel for Washington’s second preseason game that he learned he would be starting.

It was, as McCoy would later describe, the “best-case scenario in my role,” as close as he could come to replicating a game-like scenario, one in which he comes off the bench in the event starter Kirk Cousins should be hurt.

Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins stood on the field hours before Friday’s preseason game against the New York Jets and threw passes to his wide receivers.

Just 30 minutes before the 7:30 p.m. start he was in full uniform doing the same thing in warm-ups. There was no indication his night was just about over.

There was a bit of acting being displayed by Cousins, he tells Grant Paulsen and Danny Rouhier.

“Yeah, you know, I think I had a little bit of Daniel Day-Cousins going on,” Cousins said Thursday. “I didn’t know until I arrived, but once I went out for warm-ups, I knew that I wasn’t going to be playing that night, but felt like there’s still a benefit in going out there, and warming up, and just getting the throws in being that we had the next day off anyways.”

“I wanted to make sure I kept it as game-like as possible until the actual game started,” he said. “As best you can do that.”

“You know, it caught me off guard a little bit, but I understood the reasoning,” he explained. “Unlike this week, we didn’t have much time to prepare for the Jets. We only had one practice, had about a day and a half before the game to really even think about the Jets, so as a result, it just made it a little tougher to go out there and really have a plan in place, whereas this week would be the opposite of that.”